On Wednesday, June 13, 1962, the Maasdam slid into its pier in Hoboken, New Jersey. The Oswalds were packed and waiting below. Tense and nervous throughout the voyage, Lee literally jumped when they heard a knock at the door of their cabin. He stepped back, whirled around, and stood confronting the door. It was their waiter, Pieter. He had come to say goodbye. Shyly, he showed Marina a photograph of the French girl he was meeting in New York. When he left and the door had closed behind him, Marina sensed the tension seeping out of her husband’s body. He had been expecting the police.
With the baby cradled in Marina’s arms, the Oswalds made their way up to the deck. Lee’s tension returned, and he peered anxiously from side to side, looking for policemen. Someone was looking for him, but it was not the police. It was Spas T. Raikin, Russian-born representative of the Travelers’ Aid Society, which had been alerted by the Department of State. By the time Mr. Raikin got on board, he found that the Oswalds had cleared Immigration. He had Lee Oswald paged by loudspeaker several times, but no one answered. As Raikin phrased it a few days later in his report: “I had the impression that he was trying to escape meeting anybody.”1
The Oswalds, meanwhile, engulfed in the chaos of the pier, were waiting to go through customs. Marina did not like the way the customs officers tore open the luggage of rich and poor alike, exposing possession—and poverty—to view. Otherwise, she was luxuriating in the adventure of arrival. She was pleased that it was raining. Rain meant good luck for her. Likewise the fact that it was June 13: thirteen was her lucky number. As for her husband, Marina noticed he was no longer nervous, only a bit depressed. In Russia he had boasted that reporters would meet them when they arrived in America. Now he declared emphatically: “Thank God there are no reporters!” He also said that he hoped his mother would not be there.
It was on the crowded dock that Raikin found them. He guided them through customs and out to a Travelers’ Aid limousine, asking questions all the way. Even in this short span of time, Lee managed to tell quite a few lies, among them that he had been a Marine stationed at the US embassy in Moscow when he met and married Marina, that he had renounced his American citizenship, and that he had paid the family’s entire transportation to New York. He added that he had $63 in his pocket and was headed for his brother’s home in Texas. His brother would be unable to help him with the fare. Lee accepted the Travelers’ Aid offer of help, Raikin noted, “with confidence and appreciation.”2
From Hoboken the Oswalds were taken to the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 41st Street and thence, by cab, to the Special Services office of the New York City Department of Welfare, on Franklin Street. They were greeted by a Polish-speaking woman, who gave them coffee and apologized to Marina that the worker who spoke Russian was not in that day. Marina was surprised, to put it mildly, that in an hour or two in New York she had already met a Russian, Mr. Raikin, and now a Pole who was apologizing that there was no one there to speak to her in her native tongue.
The Special Services office was the scene of a confrontation between Lee and members of the Department of Welfare. Told that the Oswalds had no funds, an official of the department, in routine fashion, called Lee’s next of kin, Robert, to ask him to furnish $200 for airfare for Lee and Marina from New York to Dallas–Fort Worth. Vada Oswald, Robert’s wife, answered the phone. She promised to contact her husband and have the money sent immediately. When Lee was informed, he was “quite angered, really very upset.” He “stomped around” and refused to accept his brother’s money.3 It was up to the Department of Welfare to pay the fare, he said. The members of the department stood firm; by law the department was required to ask friends or relatives to meet such expenses if they could. Finally, Lee accepted their decision.
Marina had absented herself to breastfeed the baby. Unable to understand English, she missed most of the scene, but she surmised that Lee was misleading the department about how much money he had. To her the mere fact that he claimed to have only $63 was prima facie evidence that he had more, since “how could he live without lying?” She knew that he had had nearly $200 when he left Moscow and had spent hardly any of it since. Moreover, he had warned her on shipboard not to answer any questions about how much money they had. He wanted them, he said, to pay for everything, although he did not say who “they” were.
The Oswalds were taken to the Times Square Hotel, a large, dingy building located at Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street. Lee actually volunteered to pay the bill. He deposited Marina and the baby in their room and quickly vanished, promising to bring them something to eat.
The first thing Marina noticed was how dirty the room was. “Ten dollars a day and such filth,” she said to herself. She switched on the radio and decided to take a bath. But the letters on the faucets, “H” and “C,” were unfamiliar to her, and she decided to wait for her husband after all. She longed to look out the window. But between her and the view there were Venetian blinds, which she had never seen before, and they were black with soot. She snatched a washcloth and started to scrub them. She was still at it when her husband returned.
He brought hamburgers and French fries, another new experience for Marina. Nervous yet elated, he placed a call to Robert and Vada in Fort Worth. Marina was fascinated to hear him speak English on the telephone. He handed her the phone and told her to say something to Vada.
“Hi, Vada,” said Marina, blushing and incredulous to be speaking “English” for the first time.
Afterward Lee explained about the faucets, and “hot” and “cold” became Marina’s first words of English.
She took a bath and washed the baby’s swaddling cloths. Then the three of them set off for Times Square. It was ten o’clock at night, the city was just waking up, and Marina was enraptured. With its air of nocturnal excitement, New York reminded her of her beloved Leningrad. And yet it was unlike Leningrad, too. The stores were brilliantly lit, and Marina had never seen so much to buy. She was riveted by the window displays and stopped to “oh” and “ah” in front of every one. To purchase these things, she supposed, you had to know somebody, had to have special connections. Oh no, Lee assured her, you didn’t need any connections. The only thing you had to have was money. Grinning at her enjoyment, he steered her into a Japanese shop and bought her a pair of sandals. Then they spotted a flock of Russian tourists, as round eyed and incredulous as Marina. At the sight and sound of them, certain that she had seen her last Russian for all time, Marina was more incredulous still. They went to a food counter to eat, then back to the hotel, tired and happy.
The next morning, June 14, Lee returned to the Franklin Street office of the Department of Welfare and, accompanied by a department representative, went to a nearby Western Union office to collect the $200 sent by Robert. At the West Side Air Terminal, on Tenth Avenue and 42nd Street, he bought two tickets for Delta Flight 821. The cost was $183.04. Lee, Marina, and the baby flew to Texas from Idlewild Airport.
Marina was delighted by the smooth flight, even by the uniforms the stewardesses wore. But again she was troubled by the stares of her fellow passengers, who were intrigued by the sight of a swaddled baby. Marina had no idea that swaddling was strange to anyone. She was aware only that the people around her were better dressed than she and that they were staring. She shrank inwardly. She and the baby must look like beggars, she thought again.
Robert and Vada, their four-year-old daughter Cathy, and their baby son Robert Lee met them when their plane touched down at Love Field. The two brothers had last seen each other not quite three years before.
“What? No photographers or anything?” Lee greeted Robert as he swung jauntily through the gate. He asked again as soon as they were settled in Robert’s car: Had Robert had any calls from reporters?
Yes, Robert answered. On June 8, nearly a week before, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had published a front-page photo of Lee and a story headed: “Ex-Marine Reported on Way Back from Russia,” based on information given to American reporters by the US embassy in Moscow. Robert had two or three calls from reporters after that, he said, but following Lee’s firm instructions from Minsk, he had told them nothing. Robert had the impression that his brother was “disappointed” by the absence of the press.4
Marina, meanwhile, was preoccupied by something quite different. Vada and Robert and their children were all so perfectly dressed. Would they, too, think she was a beggar? Would they notice how clumsily her shoes were sewn together? Her embarrassment deepened on the drive from Love Field to Fort Worth when Vada, with Lee translating, offered to fix Marina’s hair. “I must look really dreadful,” Marina thought. She did not realize that Vada, a beautician, was simply offering the best she had to give.
“My brother is a worker,” Lee told her as soon as they set foot in Robert’s house. “Yet look at this. He’s got a car and a house of his own!” And to Marina, indeed, Robert’s small, one-story house looked like paradise on earth. She had never in all her life supposed that one man, his wife, and children could fill up a whole house by themselves.
She took an immediate liking to Robert and Vada, and she liked the cleanliness of the house. It was frustrating to be unable to speak to them directly without asking Lee to translate. But despite the language barrier, she soon learned why she had attracted so much attention on the plane.
“Why do you wrap up the baby?” Vada asked.
“Because swaddling is better for her,” Lee said, defending the Russian way.
Nothing daunted, Vada showed them how to diaper the child. But before they put the baby to bed, Lee told Marina to swaddle her again—“She’ll sleep better the way she’s used to.” After that the baby wore diapers by day and swaddling by night, when Vada did not see her.
Robert Oswald, a salesman for the Acme Brick Company of Fort Worth and, at twenty-eight, five years older than Lee, thought that his brother had changed. His skin was ruddier now and not so fair, he had lost a few pounds, and he seemed, at least until he relaxed a bit after the first few days, “tense and anxious.” But the biggest change was his hair. It was kinky now, in contrast to the natural curl it had had before, and it had thinned out badly on top. Thinking it over long afterward and reflecting that men in his family all had a full head of hair, Robert wondered if Lee had been subjected to shock treatments in Russia that changed his thinking as well as his hair. The only other change he noticed was that Lee seemed more “outgoing” than he had been before.
The day after their arrival, on Friday, June 15, another member of the family materialized, the boys’ mother, Marguerite Oswald. She was working as a practical nurse in nearby Crowell, Texas, and she came to spend the weekend. Marguerite was a small woman, short legged and a little top-heavy looking. She had a large, square head; gray hair; and spectacles. Her clothes gave the impression of having been carefully selected and put together, the choice of a coherent personality. Marina liked her, especially her soft gray hair.
Marguerite was overjoyed to see Lee. He was not quite as happy to see her. “She’s gotten fat,” he apologized. “She’s changed a lot. She didn’t used to be that fat.”
“What do you expect?” Marina asked. “She’s not a girl of fifteen.”
Marguerite and Lee were arguing before the weekend was over. “She thinks that she did it all,” Lee grumbled. “She thinks she’s the one who got us out.”
Marguerite told Lee that she was planning to write a book about his defection. She had been working on it for some time. The year before, she had been to Washington and had asked to see President Kennedy as part of the background. “Mother,” Lee said emphatically, “you are not going to write a book.”
“Lee, don’t tell me what to do,” Marguerite replied. “I cannot write the book now because, honey, you are alive and back. It has nothing to do with you and Marina. It is my life, because of your defection.”
“Mother,” Lee said again, “I tell you, you are not to write the book. They could kill [Marina] and her family.”5
But on another matter mother and son agreed. Both criticized the US Department of State for the “red tape” that had delayed Lee’s return. Spontaneously, both made the same complaints, both used identical expressions, and both made the same errors of fact. Robert took no part in the airing of complaints by his mother and Lee and did not seem to look at things the same way.
While old relationships were being renewed, Vada Oswald and her sister, Gloria Jean, were busy transforming Marina, tailoring her to the brilliant Texas sun. They produced a pair of shorts and urged her to try them on. Marina did—and was horrified at the sight of her own legs. Then Vada cut her hair and gave her a permanent wave. Marina emerged into the backyard wearing shorts for the first time in her life, and with short, wavy hair. Robert and Lee rose to their feet. “You’re a real American now,” Lee said. “You won’t stick out any more.”
Robert was more gallant. He paid Marina many compliments, so many that it finally dawned on her that to Robert at least she was not just a “little Russian fool.” Emboldened, she asked Lee to inquire whether Robert was sorry that his brother had married a Russian.
“Oh, no,” Robert answered. “I was afraid he would marry a Japanese.”6
Lee, meanwhile, had already abandoned the baby’s Russian name, Marina, and was calling her “Junka” or “June.” And he told Marina to please call him “Lee,” not “Alka,” or Robert would think she did not know his name. She eventually came to use both names; later, looking back on their life together, she realized that “Alka” was the name she used when she was thinking of their happier, Russian days. “Lee,” his American name, was the name she used when she was angry, the name he wrung from her when he was spiteful. Those mean, spiteful moods, when it seemed as if there was no wound he was incapable of inflicting, came upon him at Robert’s. They began, it seemed to Marina later, when he started looking for a job. They got worse as time when on, and as being in his old environment again simply got Lee down.
But at first there was gaiety and laughter. Marina loved to laugh. She loved looking at things in a humorous way and was not above clowning now and then. Although Lee often laughed at Marina, he did not always laugh with her. He seemed edgy in the presence of her laughter, wary that it might be directed at him and might belittle him somehow.
Other strains in their relationship began to show almost immediately. Lee was irritated at constantly having to translate for her. He scolded Marina because she had not studied English. “But, Alka,” she said, “you didn’t let me.” He answered that she should have studied English anyway and would have if she really cared.
After a long weekend talking and getting reacquainted with Robert and Vada, Lee was out on the streets of Fort Worth. The first thing he did was check the Yellow Pages for a public stenographer, and on the morning of Monday, June 18, Miss Pauline Virginia Bates glanced up from her typewriter to see a young man walk in clad in dark trousers and a dark blazer with only a T-shirt underneath.7
Lee asked her to do some typing. Out of a large manila folder, he took a sheaf of notes and explained that they had been smuggled out of Russia under his clothes. “Some are typed on a little portable, some of ’em are handwritten in ink, some in pencil. I’ll have to sit right here and help you with ’em because some are in Russian and some are in English.”
They spent a total of eight hours together on three successive days. Miss Bates typed, and Lee sat next to her, deciphering his own handwriting, translating Russian phrases here and there, answering her questions about Russia. Not that Miss Bates found him talky. “If you asked him a question, no matter how simple it was, if he didn’t want to answer it, he’d just shut up. If you got ten words out of him at a time, you were doing good.” She noticed, too, that “he had the deadest eyes I ever saw.”
She found his notes “fascinating” but “bitter.” His comments about Russia were just as bitter. And each afternoon, when he left, he grabbed up everything and took it with him, even the carbon paper. Finally, on Wednesday, June 20, Miss Bates noticed that he was “nervous.” Instead of sitting by her desk, he paced up and down, peered over her shoulder, and kept asking how far she had gotten. The moment she finished the tenth page, a third of the manuscript by her reckoning, he stopped her. She had done $10 worth of work, and that was all he had to give her.
Miss Bates offered to finish up for free.
“No,” Lee said. “I don’t work that way.” And he took a $10 bill from his pocket, handed it to her, and walked out. That was the last she ever saw of him.
On their second afternoon of work together, Lee told Miss Bates that he had met a Russian-speaking engineer in Fort Worth. He flourished a piece of stationery with the man’s letterhead on it. This man, he said, had read all the notes and offered to help get them published. None of this was true, except for the central fact that Lee had met a Russian-born engineer.
On Monday, June 18, the day he discovered Miss Bates, Lee had also visited the office of the Texas Employment Commission in Fort Worth. There, he scouted job opportunities and asked whether there was anyone in town who spoke Russian. He was given two names.
Thus, on the morning of June 19, the telephone rang in the office of Peter Paul Gregory, a consulting petroleum engineer in Fort Worth.8 Gregory, then approaching the age of sixty, had been born in Chita, Siberia, fled Russia in 1919, and lived for a while in Japan. Eventually, he made his way to Berkeley, California, where he received a degree in petroleum engineering, and thence to Texas.
The voice on the other end of Gregory’s line was that of a young man who was looking for a job as a Russian-English translator and wanted a letter attesting that he was qualified. Falsely and for no apparent reason, the young man added that he had been given Gregory’s name at the Fort Worth Public Library, where Gregory taught a class, rather than by the employment commission.
Gregory had never met the young man and, since they were both speaking English, had no idea of his language qualifications. He suggested, therefore, that the caller come by the office to be tested. At eleven that morning the young man appeared at Gregory’s office in downtown Fort Worth, wearing clothes that looked ridiculous in the Texas heat: a flannel suit and “atrocious” Russian shoes. The young man’s name was Lee Oswald.
Gregory, a graying man with spectacles and mustache, had a grave and courteous air. Without saying a word or asking a question, he simply reached for the bookshelf and pulled down a standard Soviet secondary school history text. He selected a passage at random and asked the visitor to read aloud in Russian. He did, and very well, too. Gregory asked the young man to translate. He did, also very well. With that, Gregory wrote out a letter and gave it to the young man, addressed “To Whom It May Concern,” and stating that Lee Harvey Oswald was qualified to be a translator or interpreter in the Russian and English languages.
Gregory was curious about Oswald. Noting to himself that he appeared to speak Russian with an accent, Gregory asked if he was of Polish descent? No, Lee answered. He had grown up in Fort Worth, but he had lived in Russia nearly three years and brought back a wife and a baby. Feeling more sympathetic every moment, the kindly Gregory told Lee that he knew of no job openings but would like an address where he might reach him. Then he took Lee to lunch.
Like every Russian who lives in exile, Gregory was intensely curious about conditions in his homeland. Over lunch he asked Lee about wages and prices, about the job he had held, and how people in the Soviet Union were getting on. As for the question of how he happened to go to Russia in the first place, Lee simply answered: “I went there on my own.” Gregory delicately shrank from asking more, sensing the question to be a touchy one. But he reflected that it was extraordinary that the young man had managed to get his wife out, for he had heard of countless cases in which exit visas had been refused.
When Lee showed up at Miss Bates’s that afternoon, it was Gregory’s “To Whom It May Concern” letter that he waved before her and Gregory who, he told her falsely, had read his manuscript and wanted to get it published. Lee would, in fact, on a later visit to Gregory’s office, show him typewritten sheets and say that he was writing memoirs of his life in the USSR. But Gregory did not read the sheets, and Lee never asked him to. Gregory did notice, however, that there were photographs attached to some of them.
Lee was elated by his first meeting with Gregory. “Mama, Mama,” he told Marina triumphantly that evening. “I’ve found you some Russians in Fort Worth. Now you won’t be lonely any more.” But again, lying to her for no apparent reason, he said that he had been given Gregory’s name at the public library and not at the employment commission.
When Gregory told his family that he had met a young American who had just arrived in Fort Worth with a Soviet wife, his youngest son, Paul, was especially interested. He was a student at the University of Oklahoma about to enter his junior year and engaged in the study of Russian. He told his father that he would like to meet the Oswalds, especially Marina, and perhaps arrange to take language lessons from her. Her Russian would be fresh and up to date, whereas that of his father, who had been forty years in exile, might no longer encompass the idiom of young people in Russia. Less than a week after their first meeting, therefore, the Gregorys, father and son, paid a call at the house of Robert Oswald.
Lee was proud as he introduced his wife to the Russian he had found for her. Marina at first was not so sure. She did not quite take to the elder Gregory, a Russian of the pre-Revolutionary generation, who seemed uncertain how to converse with a Soviet girl. Her reservations passed, however, and the four of them visited for an hour, with the Gregorys directing most of their questions to Marina. By the time they left, it was arranged that Paul, after a short visit to San Francisco, would take Russian lessons from Marina.
Lee, meanwhile, had already telephoned the other Russian whose name he was given at the employment commission. Her name was “Gali” Clark, the wife of Max Clark, a Fort Worth attorney. Lee told Mrs. Clark that he had just arrived with a Soviet wife and was looking for a woman for her to talk Russian to. Unlike Peter Gregory, however, Mrs. Clark already knew of Oswald. She had read about him in the Fort Worth paper, and her impression had not been favorable. She considered him a turncoat. She put him off by saying that her husband was not at home; she would consult him, and they would call back.
A few days later, on Sunday, June 24, Mrs. Clark telephoned Lee and invited him to drive over that afternoon with his wife and child. But Lee, offended that he had not been welcomed on the first call, was churlish to Mrs. Clark and told her that he could not make it.9
That evening at the dinner table with Robert and Vada, he told Marina about the call. She berated him for being rude, and angry words passed between them. They were speaking in Russian, of course, when suddenly, in a shift of mood, he told her to smile, be nice, and not let on to Robert that they were having a fight. Marina refused to pretend. He called her a dirty word, and she quickly got up and left the table. Lee followed her into the bedroom. He was pale with anger, and there was a cold, pitiless look in his eyes which Marina had not seen before. Quietly, very quietly, so that Robert would not hear, he cuffed her several times, hard, across the face. He told her to say nothing to Robert or he would kill her.
Marina slipped out of the house in a state of shock. For two hours she walked alone around the neighborhood, trying to make sense of her situation. Now she knew what it was to be completely helpless. She did not speak a word of English. She knew no one. There was no one who could understand her even if she did try to explain her plight. Alka was all she had, her only friend and her support. And he was changing toward her. She was stunned by his capacity for hypocrisy: his ability to be nice to outsiders and at the same time cruel to her, behind their backs. She felt that she would never be able to count on him again.
As Marina walked alone that night, she glanced into the windows of people’s houses, saw them watching TV, saw them leading normal lives. Why on earth had she ever left Aunt Valya? She was unhappy about staying with Robert and Vada. It was wrong to live off other people and not know how to help them, how they cooked and cleaned house. She believed that Vada did not like her, and Robert had witnessed the angry scene at the dinner table without saying a word to defend her. But the main thing was Alka. She was beginning to be afraid of him.
She had no choice but to endure. She had the baby. The baby depended on her, and neither had anybody else. With a heavy, automatic feeling, Marina went back—back to Alka and the baby. He was awake in bed, but he did not speak to her.
The next day, things were smoothed over with Alka, somehow, and that day she met Peter Gregory. She did not think of it at the time, but it was her first encounter with someone who could rescue her, someone to whom she could, if she chose, explain her plight in her native tongue.